Frankenstein@200 Steering Committee
Russ B. Altman, Bioengineering, Genetics, Medicine (General Medical Discipline), and, by courtesy, Computer Science
Russ Biagio Altman is a professor of bioengineering, genetics, & medicine (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the Bioengineering Department at Stanford University. His primary research interests are in the application of computing and informatics technologies to problems relevant to medicine. He is particularly interested in methods for understanding drug action at molecular, cellular, organism and population levels. His lab studies how human genetic variation impacts drug response (e.g. http://www.pharmgkb.org/). Other work focuses on the analysis of biological molecules to understand the action, interaction and adverse events of drugs (http://features.stanford.edu/). Dr. Altman holds an A.B. from Harvard College, and M.D. from Stanford Medical School, and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Sciences from Stanford. He received the U.S. Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He is a fellow of the American College of Physicians (ACP), the American College of Medical Informatics (ACMI), the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. He is a past-President, founding board member, and a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), and a past-President of the American Society for Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (ASCPT). He has chaired the Science Board advising the FDA Commissioner, and currently serves on the NIH Director’s Advisory Committee. He is an organizer of the annual Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing (http://psb.stanford.edu/), and a founder of Personalis, Inc. Dr. Altman is board certified in Internal Medicine and in Clinical Informatics. He received the Stanford Medical School graduate teaching award in 2000, and mentorship award in 2014.
Eduardo Vivanco Antolin, PhD candidate, Art and Art History
Eduardo is completing his dissertation called "The School of Frankenstein,” centered on the famous film still of the monster and the little girl beside an alpine lake in James Whale's classic 1931 movie Frankenstein. Eduardo received a Fullbright Scholarship to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He earned a bachelor’s in architecture in Spain, where he opened his own firm and taught at the ETSA of Madrid. His work, as architect and artist, has been exhibited and published in the United States and Europe.
Laurel Braitman, Medicine & the Muse
Dr. Laurel Braitman is a New York Times bestselling author, historian and anthropologist of science. She is currently a Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Biomedical Ethics at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a Contributing Writer for Pop Up Magazine. She holds a PhD in Science, Technology and Society from MIT and is a Senior TED Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and other publications. Her last book, Animal Madness (Simon & Schuster 2015) was a NYT bestseller and has been translated into seven languages. Her work and collaborations with musicians and artists have been featured on the BBC, NPR, Good Morning America and Al Jazeera. She's taught popular interdisciplinary courses at Stanford School of Medicine, Harvard, MIT, Smith College and elsewhere and is passionate about working with musicians, physicians, scientists, and artists. Braitman’s latest TED talk has been watched by over a million people and her talks on navigating chaos and uncertainty pack theaters around the world. Her next book (forthcoming, Simon & Schuster) is about medicine, family and mortality.
Scott Bukatman, Art & Art History
Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. His most recent book, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit, celebrates play, plasmatic possibility, and the life of images in cartoons, comics, and cinema. Bukatman has been published in abundant journals and anthologies, including October, Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, and Science Fiction Studies. He is presently completing a study that uses Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics to better understand the ways in which comics engage and engross their readers.
Christopher Costanza, Lecturer and Artist-in-Residence (Cello, St. Lawrence String Quartet)
For three decades, cellist Christopher Costanza has enjoyed an exciting and varied career as soloist, chamber musician, and teacher. A winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions and the recipient of a Solo Recitalists Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Costanza has performed to enthusiastic critical acclaim throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada, South America, Australia, New Zealand, China, and South Korea. In 2003 Mr. Costanza joined the St. Lawrence String Quartet, Ensemble in Residence at Stanford University. A strong proponent of contemporary music, he has worked extensively with the world's leading composers, such as John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Olivier Messiaen, and Pierre Boulez. Mr. Costanza's discography includes chamber music and solo recordings on the EMI/Angel, Nonesuch, Naxos, and Albany labels, and recently he launched an innovative new website, costanzabach.stanford.edu, featuring his recordings of the Six Suites for Solo Cello by J.S. Bach. Mr. Costanza received a Bachelor of Music and an Artist Diploma from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where he studied cello with Bernard Greenhouse, Laurence Lesser, and David Wells, and chamber music with Eugene Lehner, Louis Krasner, and Leonard Shure.
Ryan Davis, Associate Director of Engagement and Public Programs
Ryan M. Davis is a dramaturg, performance critic, and curator of cultural events. An advanced doctoral candidate at the Yale School of Drama, he was awarded both the John W. Gassner Memorial Prize for criticism and the George Pierce Baker Fellowship for work on his dissertation, Ad Nauseum: Disgust, Boredom, and Theatrical Modernism. His writing on contemporary theater, dance, and performance art has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, The Drama Review, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art and Theater, where he served as associate editor. He has taught at Yale College and guest lectured at Mount Holyoke and the Yale School of Drama. He has worked at various theaters and live arts festivals in his hometown of New Orleans, New York City, and New England, including New Haven's International Festival of Arts and Ideas, before joining the programming staff at Stanford Live as its Associate Director of Engagement and Public Programs, curating its ideas series Live Context.
Shane Denson, Art & Art History
Shane Denson is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, comics, games, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (Transcript-Verlag/Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of several collections: Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives (Bloomsbury, 2013), Digital Seriality (special issue of Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2014), and the open-access book Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film (REFRAME Books, 2016).
HIs first video, which he made some time back, is on the role of sound (and image-sound relations) in Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein — “Sight and Sound Conspire: Monstrous Audio-Vision in James Whale’s Frankenstein” (published in [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies).
His more recent video is an “annotation essay” on Edison’s Frankenstein of 1910 — “The Meaning of ‘Animation’ in Edison’s Frankenstein”.
See also shanedenson.com for more info.
Jennifer DeVere Brody, Theater & Performance Studies
Jennifer DeVere Brody is Department Chair and Director of the Division of Dance; Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and Affiliate in the CCSRE; Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Race Theory, Performance Studies. Jennifer DeVere Brody's work has appeared in Theatre Journal, Signs, Genders, Callaloo, Text and Performance Quarterly and in several edited volumes. Her books, Impossible Purities (Duke University Press, 1998) and Punctuation: Art, Politics and Play (Duke University Press, 2008) both discuss relations among and between sexuality, gender, racialization, visual studies and performance. She has served as the President of the Women and Theatre Program, on the board of Women and Performance and has worked with the Ford and Mellon Foundations. She co-produced “The Theme is Blackness” festival of black plays in Durham, NC. Her research and teaching focus on performance, aesthetics, politics and subjectivity as well as feminist theory, queer studies and contemporary cultural studies. Currently, she is working with colleagues the re-publication of James Baldwin’s illustrated book, Little Man, Little Man and a new book about the intersections of sculpture and performance.
Petra Dierkes-Thrun, PhD, Director of Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning, Coordinator, Stanford's Year of Learning, Lecturer, Department of Comparative Literature
Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s research and teaching interests include the European and transatlantic fin de siècle and modernism (including literature, the visual arts, opera, dance, and film); feminist and queer theory; LGBTQ literary and cultural studies; and digital pedagogy as well as literary theory for the digital age; pedagogically smart uses of technology in teaching, and project-based learning in the Humanities. She serves as an Advisory Editor for Gender and Sexuality Studies at boundary 2 (Duke University Press). She was the Founding Editor of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies, a peer-reviewed, international scholarly online journal dedicated to the figure of the New Woman in fin-de-siècle and modernist society and culture (Rivendale Press, UK).
Diana Farid, Medicine
Diana Farid MD, MPH is a clinical instructor in the Stanford department of medicine, staff physician at the Stanford Vaden student health center and affiliated faculty of Stanford's Medicine and the Muse, Program in Bioethics and Film. She has served as a physician consultant to entertainment media to promote adolescent health through television and film and in 2009 completed production of her debut feature length documentary film, “American Rhythms,” depicting the impact of drumming on the education and health of a class of 5th grade students. Her current writing projects include poetry and a children’s picture book series.
Charlotte Fonrobert, Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies
Jacqueline Genovese, Assistant Director, Medicine and the Muse Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
Jacqueline Genovese received her master’s in Medical Humanities in 2013 from the Institute for the Medical Humanities, UTMB – Galveston. Her thesis concerned Post-Traumatic Story Disorder. She teaches writing and literature for Stanford students who are veterans or military-related, and she leads literature and medicine series at Stanford Hospital for physicians and at VA San Francisco for health professionals. As Assistant Director of the Medicine and the Muse Program, she coordinates multiple events, workshops and multidisciplinary education initiatives. She is a writer for Scopeblog and is a member of the Stanford Committee for Professional Satisfaction and Support.
Denise Gigante, English
Denise Gigante teaches eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, with a focus on Romanticism. Her interests include the longer historical tradition of poetry and poetics, the English periodical essay, the Romantic novel, taste, gastronomy, aesthetic theory, antiquarianism, and the history of the book. She is currently working on The Book Madness: A Story of Book Collectors in America and is the author of The Keats Brothers: The Life of John and George, (just released by Harvard UP in paperback), Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (Yale UP, 2009), Taste: A Literary History (Yale UP, 2005), and two anthologies: The Great Age of the English Essay (Yale UP, 2008) and Gusto: Essential Writings in Nineteenth-Century Gastronomy (Routledge, 2005).
Henry T. Greely, Center for Law and the Biosciences; by courtesy, Genetics, Steering Committee of the Center for Biomedical Ethics, Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society
Henry T. Greely (BA ’74) specializes in the ethical, legal, and social implications of new biomedical technologies, particularly those related to neuroscience, genetics, or stem cell research. He frequently serves as an advisor on California, national, and international policy issues. He is chair of California’s Human Stem Cell Research Advisory Committee, a member of the Advisory Council of the NIH’s National Institute for General Medical Sciences, a member of the Committee on Science, Technology, and Law of the National Academies, a member of the Neuroscience Forum of the Institute of Medicine, and served from 2007-2010 as co-director of the Law and Neuroscience Project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Professor Greely chairs the steering committee for the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics and directs both the law school’s Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society. In 2007 Professor Greely was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1985, Greely was a partner at Tuttle & Taylor, served as a staff assistant to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy, and as special assistant to the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense. He served as a law clerk to Justice Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court and to Judge John Minor Wisdom of the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
Greely is also a professor (by courtesy) of genetics at Stanford School of Medicine. He received the University’s Richard W. Lyman Prize in 2013.
Robert Harrison, Rosina Pierotti Professor in Italian Literature, Chair of Undergraduate Studies, Italian
Professor Harrison received his doctorate in romance studies from Cornell University in 1984, with a dissertation on Dante's Vita Nuova. In 1985 he accepted a visiting assistant professorship in the Department of French and Italian at Stanford. In 1986 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor. He was granted tenure in 1992 and was promoted to full professor in 1995. In 1997 Stanford offered him the Rosina Pierotti Chair. In 2002, he was named chair of the Department of French and Italian. He is also lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.
Professor Harrison's first book, The Body of Beatrice, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1988. A revised and elaborated version of his dissertation, it deals with medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. The Body of Beatrice was translated into Japanese in 1994. Over the next few years Professor Harrison worked on his next book, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, which appeared in 1992 with University of Chicago Press. This book deals with the multiple and complex ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. It offers a select history that begins in antiquity and ends in our own time. Forests appeared simultaneously in English, French, Italian, and German. It subsequently appeared in Japanese and Korean as well. In 1994 his book Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? appeared in France, Italy, and Germany. This book is written in the form of dialogues between two characters and deals with various topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society. Professor Harrison's next book, The Dominion of the Dead, published in 2003 by University of Chicago Press, deals with the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. This book was translated into German, French and Italian. Professor Harrison's most recent book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, which appeared in 2008 with the University of Chicago Press, and in French with Le Pommier. In 2005 Harrison started a literary talk show on KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions." The show features hour long conversation with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists.
Aleta Hayes, Contemporary Dance and Performance, Founder & Director of the Chocolate Heads
Aleta Hayes is a “contemporary dancer, choreographer, performer, and teacher.” She holds an M.F.A in Dance and Choreography from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and a B.A. in Drama, Dance and the Visual Arts from Stanford. Hayes has taught at Wesleyan University, Swarthmore College, Rutgers University, and Princeton University, where she developed “pedagogically innovative courses that combined cultural and performance history, theory, and performance.”
Before beginning her career in academia, Hayes lived in New York City for fifteen years where she choreographed many pieces including: Hatsheput, presented at the Place Theater, London and St. Marks Church, New York; Tarantantara, presented at Jacob’s Pillow; and La Chanteuse Nubienne (written by playwright Daniel Alexander Jones), performed for Movement Research at Judson Church. As a dancer, Hayes has had “leading roles in major works by other artists such as Jane Comfort and Robert Wilson.
In 2004, Hayes returned to Stanford on a Ford Foundation Resident Dialogues Fellowship through the Committee on Black Performing Arts to create The Wedding Project, a “performance piece of multiple genres illustrating the evolution of American social dance through the narrative of African American wedding traditions.” In 2005, Hayes was named a Peninsula Community Foundation Artist-in-Residence at Eastside Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, where she led The ReMix Project—a “montage of music, monologue, and movement examining student aspirations in a low-income, racially-mixed neighborhood.” Most recently, Hayes founded The Chocolate Heads Movement Band in 2009 (a collective of dancers, musicians, visual artists, performance poets and writers), and has collaborated with performer Cooper Moore to create a dance-music installation called “Singing the Rooms—Performance of the Everyday.”
Alvan Ikoku, Comparative Literature, DLCL and Medicine
Alvan Ikoku is assistant professor in the departments of comparative literature and medicine. He received his MD from Harvard and PhD in comparative literature from Columbia. Prior to joining the faculty in 2014, he was an Andrew W Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at the humanities center. He is currently affiliated with the centers for African studies and comparative studies in race and ethnicity, as well as the centers for biomedical ethics and global health. Ikoku specializes in the study of literary and medical discourses on Africa and its diasporas, with particular attention to fiction, narrative ethics, and histories of tropical medicine and global health. His research has situated these discourses within post-nineteenth-century movements in world literature and world health. And his current book project, Forms of Global Health, studies the place of the novel in the evolution of global health as a medical field.
Shaili Jain, School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry
Shaili Jain, M.D. is a psychiatrist who serves as Medical Director of the Primary Care Behavioral Health Team at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. Dr. Jain is a researcher affiliated with the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and a Clinical Assistant Professor affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Stanford University. Her medical essays and commentary have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, public radio and elsewhere . Dr. Jain is a member of the Medicine & the Muse steering committee, a member of Pegasus Physician Writers, and the faculty director of the annual Medicine & the Muse symposium.
Branislav Jakovljevic, TAPS, Avant-garde and Experimental Theater, Performance and Critical Theory
Branislav Jakovljevic (pronounced Ya-kov-le-vich) is an Associate Professor at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies, Stanford University. He specializes in avant-garde and experimental theater, performance theory, critical theory, and performance and politics. He has published essays on a broad variety of subjects, from history of late nineteenth-century theater, to Russian and Soviet avant-garde, to contemporary American experimental performance. His works have been published in the United States (Theatre Journal, TDR, PAJ, Art Journal, Theater) and in Europe (Serbia, United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, Croatia, Poland, and Belgium). His book Daniil Kharms: Writing and the Event was published by Northwestern University Press in 2009. He recently completed his second book manuscript, Beyond the Performance Principle: Self-Management and Conceptual Art in Yugoslavia. In 2009, he received Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) 2009 Outstanding Article Award for the essay “From Mastermind to Body Artist: Political Performances of Slobodan Milosevic” (published in TDR 52:1, 2008). He was a recipient of the Theodore and Frances Geballe Research Workshops, Stanford Humanities Center, 2011-2012 for the project “Art as Documentation, Memory as Art,” (2011-2012), and in 2009 he received prestigious Hellman Faculty Scholar Award for the project "Province without Borders: Yugoslav Conflict from Local Politics to Global Justice." In 2013 he chaired 19th annual Performance Studies international conference "Now Then: Performance and Temporality" at Stanford University.
Charles Junkerman, Dean and Associate Provost, Continuing Studies
Charlie Junkerman is director of the MLA program in the Department of Continuing Studies. At Stanford he has taught courses covering a broad range of subjects—from Native American photography to John Cage—in the departments of English, history and anthropology. His special area of interest is 19th- and 20th-century American and European literature. For a number of years he taught a graduate seminar called “Borrowing Your Neighbors’ Tools,” about cross-disciplinary theory in literature, art, history, anthropology and philosophy. A passionate rover, he has also taught a course on the literature of travel, a subject he declares is as much about self-discovery as it is about tourism. A pacifist and conscientious objector, Professor Junkerman participated with Stanford colleagues in a Northern Ireland reconciliation and forgiveness project beginning in 1999.
Dan Jurafsky, Professor and Chair of Linguistics, Professor of Computer Science
Dan Jurafsky is Professor and Chair of Linguistics and Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the recipient of a 2002 MacArthur Fellowship, is the co-author of the widely-used textbook "Speech and Language Processing", and author of "The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu”, a finalist for the 2015 James Beard Award. Dan received a B.A in Linguistics in 1983 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992 from the University of California at Berkeley and was on the faculty of the University of Colorado, Boulder before moving to Stanford in 2003. His research focuses on computational linguistics, with special interests in the automatic extraction of meaning from speech and text in English and Chinese, and on applying computational linguistics to problems in the behavioral and social sciences.
Joshua Landy, French and Comparative Literature
Joshua Landy is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French, Professor of Comparative Literature, and co-director of the Literature and Philosophy Initiative at Stanford, home to major tracks in Philosophy and Literature. Since 2013, he has also been director of the Structured Liberal Education program at Stanford.
Professor Landy is the author of Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford, 2004) and of How To Do Things with Fictions (Oxford, 2012). He is also the co-editor of two volumes, Thematics: New Approaches (SUNY, 1995, with Claude Bremond and Thomas Pavel) and The Re-Enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age (Stanford, 2009, with Michael Saler). Philosophy as Fiction deals with issues of self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-fashioning in Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, while raising the question of what literary form contributes to an engagement with such questions; How to Do Things with Fictions explores a series of texts (by Plato, Beckett, Mallarmé, and Mark) that function as training-grounds for the mental capacities.
Professor Landy has appeared on the NPR shows "Forum" and "Philosophy Talk" (on narrative selfhood and on the function of fiction) and has on various occasions been a guest host of Robert Harrison's "Entitled Opinions" (with Lera Boroditsky on Language and Thought, with Michael Saler on Re-Enchantment, with John Perry and Ken Taylor on the Uses of Philosophy, and with Alexander Nehamas on Beauty).
Professor Landy has received the Walter J. Gores Award for Teaching Excellence (1999) and the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching (2001).
James Lock, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and, by courtesy Pediatrics
James Lock, MD, Ph.D. is Professor of Child Psychiatry and Pediatrics and Associate Chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine where he also serves as Director of the Eating Disorder Program for Children and Adolescents. He is the Director of the Humanities and Medicine Program in the Department of Psychiatry.
Dr. Lock has published over 300 articles, abstracts, books and book chapters. He is the past recipient of a National Institute of Health (NIH) Career Development Award and a current recipient of a Mid-Career Award. He is active in research with 4 currently NIH funded projects related to eating disorder treatment in children and adolescents and young adults as well as numerous national and international collaborations.. His recent research focuses on integrating treatment research with neuroscience in eating disorders, including examining neurocognitive processes and their functional and neuroanatomical correlates. He has lectured widely in the US, Canada, Europe, South America, Asia and Australia and New Zealand. Dr. Lock’s current research focuses on interventions for Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa in younger patients is funded by the National Institutes of Health in the USA. He was awarded the Price Family Foundation Award for Research Excellence in 2010 and the Leadership award from the International Academy of Eating Disorders in 2014. Dr. Lock holds a master degree in Comparative Literature in Comparative Literature, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies. He was the Ellen Andrews Wright Fellow at the Humanities Center at Stanford in 2015-2016. In his spare time, Dr. Lock is an avid runner, reader, and writer of fiction and poetry.
Elizabeth Mitchell, Curator of Drawings, Prints, and Photographs, Cantor Arts Center
Elizabeth Mitchell is the Burton and Deedee McMurtry Curator of Drawings, Prints, and Photographs at Cantor. Mitchell’s duties include the oversight of nearly 16,000 artworks from the 15th to the 19th century from among the Center's collection of 44,000-plus objects in all media and diverse cultures spanning 5000 years, from ancient China and Egypt to the 21st century. She is a specialist in the field of 18th-century English prints and her research focuses on the intersection of engraving and rational medical science during the British Enlightenment.
Maren Grainger Monsen, Center for Biomedical Ethics
Maren Grainger Monsen is a physician, filmmaker-in-residence and director of the Program in Bioethics and Film at the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics. Her recent film, The Revolutionary Optimists, coproduced and directed with Nicole Newnham, was nominated for a National Emmy Award. Grainger Monsen also directed Worlds Apart and Hold Your Breath, a large-scale project on cross-cultural conflicts in medicine, which was broadcast on national public television and is currently being used in 63% of US medical schools. Grainger Monsen’s past films include The Vanishing Line, a chronicle of her journey toward understanding the art and issues of dying, which was broadcast on the national PBS "Point of View" and was awarded Program of the Year from the National Hospice Organization. She also directed Where the Highway Ends: Rural Healthcare in Crisis, which won a regional Emmy Award, and Grave Words, which was awarded first place in the American Medical Association Film Festival. She studied film at the London International Film School and received her medical training at the University of Washington and Stanford University. Grainger-Monsen is a member of the Steering Committee for the Medicine & the Muse Program.
Alexander Nemerov, Art and Art History
A scholar of American art, Nemerov writes about the presence of art, the recollection of the past, and the importance of the humanities in our lives today. Committed to teaching the history of art more broadly as well as topics in American visual culture--the history of American photography, for example--he is a noted writer and speaker on the arts. His most recent books are Wartime Kiss: Visions of the Moment in the 1940s (2013) and Acting in the Night: Macbeth and the Places of the Civil War (2010). In 2011 he published To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America (2011), the catalogue to the exhibition of the same title he curated at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Among his recent essays are pieces on Peter Paul Rubens, on Henry James, on Thomas Eakins and JFK; and on Rothko and Rembrandt.
Peggy Phelan, Department of English
Peggy Phelan is the Ann O’Day Maples Chair in the Arts Professor of Theater & Performance Studies and English. Publishing widely in both book and essay form, Phelan is the author of Unmarked: the politics of performance (Routledge, 1993); Mourning Sex: performing public memories (Routledge, 1997; honorable mention Callaway Prize for dramatic criticism 1997-1999); the survey essay for Art and Feminism, ed. by Helena Reckitt (Phaidon, 2001, winner of “The top 25 best books in art and architecture” award, amazon.com, 2001); the survey essay for Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001); and the catalog essay for Intus: Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 2004). She edited and contributed to Live Art in Los Angeles, (Routledge, 2012), and contributed catalog essays for Everything Loose Will Land: 1970s Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (Mak Center, 2013), Haunted: Contemporary Photography, Video, and Performance (Guggenheim Museum, 2010); WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007); and Andy Warhol: Giant Size (Phaidon, 2008), among others. Phelan is co-editor, with the late Lynda Hart, of Acting Out: Feminist Performances (University of Michigan Press, 1993; cited as “best critical anthology” of 1993 by American Book Review); and co-editor with Jill Lane of The Ends of Performance (New York University Press, 1997). She contributed an essay to Philip Ursprung’s Herzog and De Meurron: Natural History (CAA, 2005)
Jessica Riskin, History (affiliate member)
Jessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at Iowa State University and at MIT before coming to Stanford. Her research interests include Enlightenment science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation. She is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (University of Chicago Press, 2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, ofNature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave, 2012). She is currently finishing a book on the history of mechanist accounts of life entitled The Restless Clock, forthcoming from Basic Books.
Debra Satz, Philosophy, Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts, Director McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society
Debra Satz, a philosophy professor, is the Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities and Arts and the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor at the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society. Her research focuses on the ethical limits of markets, the place of equality in a just society, theories of rational choice, democratic theory, feminist philosophy, ethics and education, and issues of international justice. Satz also co-founded the Hope House Scholars Program, which pairs volunteer faculty with undergraduates to teach liberal arts courses to residents of a drug and alcohol treatment facility for women.
Audrey Shafer, Anesthesiology, Medicine & the Muse Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics
Audrey Shafer's interests include the language of medicine, communication and ethics in the operating room, and poetry. Her poems are published in various journals and anthologies and are collected in Sleep Talker: Poems by a Doctor/Mother. Her children's novel, The Mailbox, concerns issues of post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans. Shafer graduated from Harvard University before attending the Stanford University School of Medicine. She completed her anesthesiology training at the University of Pennsylvania and fellowship in clinical research at Stanford University Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine. Dr. Shafer teaches anesthesia residents, medical students, and undergraduates.
Jane Shaw, Office for Religious Life and Dean for Religious Life
Jane Shaw is the Dean for Religious Life at Stanford. Her duties at Stanford include providing spiritual and ethical leadership for the university as a whole, serving as the Minister of Memorial Church, and encouraging a wide spectrum of religious traditions on campus. As Professor of Religious Studies, she teaches the History of Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies. Professor Shaw is the author of A Practical Christianity (Morehouse 2012); Octavia, Daughter of God: the Story of a Female Messiah and her Followers (Yale 2011), for which she won the San Francisco Book Festival History Prize; and Miracles in Enlightenment England (Yale 2006). She is currently writing a book on the modern history of mysticism, and is also working on a project on empathy, the arts and social change with Anna Deavere Smith.
Christina Smolke, Associate Professor of Bioengineering and, by courtesy, of Chemical Engineering
Professor Smolke's research program focuses on developing modular genetic platforms for programming information processing and control functions in living systems, resulting in transformative technologies for engineering, manipulating, and probing biological systems. She has pioneered the design and application of a broad class of RNA molecules, called RNA devices, that process and transmit user-specified input signals to targeted protein outputs, thereby linking molecular computation to gene expression. This technology has been extended to efficiently construct multi-input devices exhibiting various higher-order information processing functions, demonstrating combinatorial assembly of many information processing, transduction, and control devices from a smaller number of components. Her laboratory is applying these technologies to addressing key challenges in cellular therapeutics, targeted molecular therapies, and green biosynthesis strategies.
Matthew Tiews, Associate Dean, Advancement for the Arts, Stanford Arts Institute
Matthew Tiews has worked to implement the university-wide Arts Initiative since 2010, first as Executive Director of Arts Programs and currently as Associate Dean for the Advancement of the Arts. His charge is to place the arts at the core of a Stanford education and to make the university a leader in the arts nation-wide. His duties include developing Stanford’s arts district, creating meaningful arts engagement for all Stanford students, integrating the arts throughout the university, and coordinating arts activity across departments and programs. He is responsible for extra-curricular arts programs, arts facilities, and financial oversight of non-departmental arts units; he also works within the Dean’s office to facilitate arts planning and implementation.
Gail Wight, Art & Art History, Art Practice
Gail Wight has taught in the Art Practice program at Stanford since 2003, where she directs Experimental Media Arts. Wight holds an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute where she was a Javits Fellow, and a BFA from the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Her exhibition record includes nearly two dozen solo exhibits throughout North America and Great Britain, and her work has been collected by numerous institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Yale University, and Centro Andaluz de Art Contemporaneo, Spain. Among her many artist residencies are western Australia’s Symbiotica, Art & Archaeology at Stonehenge, the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, and San Francisco’s Exploratorium. You can read about her works of art in Art and Science Now and Information Art by Stephen Wilson, Art in the Age of Technoscience by Ingeborg Reichle, Evocative Objects by Sherry Turkle, and Kunst nach der Wissenschaft by Susanne Witzgall, among other publications. Her work is represented by Patricia Sweetow Gallery in San Francisco.
Caroline Winterer, History and, by courtesy, of Classics, Anthony P. Meier Family Professor in the Humanities, Director, Stanford Humanities Center
Caroline Winterer was appointed Director of the Stanford Humanities Center in September 2013. A historian of early America, she holds the Anthony P. Meier Family Professorship in the Humanities and is Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics. She joined the Stanford faculty in 2004. She received her Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Michigan and her B.A. with honors from Pomona College in 1988.
Winterer specializes in the transmission of ideas between Europe and the Americas in the era from Columbus to the Civil War. The author of 3 books and over 30 articles, her research interests include the American Enlightenment, ideas about ancient Rome and Greece, art and material culture, and political thought. She is currently writing a book called The American Enlightenment that will be published by Yale University Press.